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In July 2016, Vijaya admitted her young daughter
to an orphanage in Hyderabad, India and then herself to a hospice for AIDS
patients. She died a few days later. Vijaya had acquired HIV long before I
first met her in 2009, but she had previously remained healthy. HIV/AIDS
initiatives had equipped her to manage well. She even worked instructing others
on how to avoid infection. Vijaya’s fortunes changed, however, on a night in
June 2015, when Hyderabadi police forcibly extracted her from the railway station
where she was soliciting customers along with dozens of other sex workers. The
police selected a few of these women to prosecute as ‘traffickers’ and logged the
rest as ‘victims of trafficking’. According to women there, the police made
this distinction arbitrarily in order to address international demands that
they not only free ‘victims’ but also locate and prosecute their ‘traffickers’.

A magistrate mandated Vijaya, against her will,
to remain in a rescue shelter until her family could produce the paperwork required
for her release. The process met with repeated complications and dragged on for
six months. During that time, the head of the shelter refused to give Vijaya the
anti-retroviral medication and nutrition necessary for managing her HIV. When she
at last walked free, her CD4 cell count was low, indicating a decline in the
health of her immune system. Her friends described her as having been ‘sucked
dry.’ Angered but also emotionally destabilised by what amounted to her
incarceration, Vijaya ignored her health and plunged into a spell of
self-destructive drinking. Seven months after her release from the shelter, I
attended her funeral. Though her shelter stay was not the sole cause of her
death, Vijaya would likely be alive today had she not been targeted by police
as a victim of trafficking, and subjected to a period of forced confinement
that lead to the deterioration of her physical and mental health.

Vijaya would likely be alive today had
she not been targeted by police as a victim of trafficking, and subjected to a
period of forced confinement that lead to the deterioration of her physical and
mental health.

Vijaya’s case is not an isolated event. Other Hyderabadi
sex workers report knowing colleagues whose death was in some way related to forced
rescue and rehabilitation. Being held in a shelter with diabetes, for instance,
poses a danger similar to HIV if regular medicines are not provided. Inadequate
medical treatment, however, is not the primary problem dogging anti-trafficking
efforts in India. It is, rather, the refusal of some anti-trafficking organisations
to distinguish women who wish to be rescued from those who do not. In
Hyderabad, some anti-traffickers disregard the desires, agency, and rights of
the very women they claim to protect, and engage instead in a misogynistic paternalism
that contradicts their feminist ideals.

During the period of my PhD fieldwork in
Hyderabad, I found it typical for police and NGO staff to round up sex workers
from their places of work through the use or threat of physical violence. Women
reported having their phones, money, jewellery and sometimes clothes taken from
them when they entered a shelter. In the name of protecting them, staff permitted
them only the most restricted contact with their family and friends, who often panicked
when they disappeared in the rescues. In addition to losing their freedom, these
women lost the opportunity to earn money, to care for their dependents, and to
meet their financial obligations.

According to women who experienced this kind of
rescue, perhaps the most excruciating aspect of being labelled a ‘victim of
trafficking’ was being subject to the process whereby
anti-traffickers determined the suitability of their ‘parents, guardian, or
husband’ to collect them and bring them home – a patriarchal requirement of
India’s legal code. The procedure provides a pretext for staff to inform women’s
landlords, neighbours, village leaders, husbands, and family members that they have
been caught selling sex in the city. As a consequence of the scandal that this
can trigger, several Hyderabadi sex workers told me that their most vital personal
relationships unravelled permanently during this process. Anti-trafficking initiatives,
though conceived as a form of care or protection, instead operated for some as a
mode of perpetual punishment.

Upon losing their freedom, some ‘rescued’ sex
workers slipped into depression and even attempted suicide. Others
rioted in response to caustic
treatment meted out by shelter staff and guards. Some attempted to escape
and some succeeded. After being removed from the streets, denied autonomy of
movement and communication, and witnessing donors touring their facilities,
some women compared being ‘rescued’ to being trafficked for NGO profits. One
sex worker told me, ‘Here we are being treated the same as how we are treated
by traffickers’. Forced rescue in India has thus birthed a mode of humanitarian
trafficking that meets many (if not all) the United Nations criteria for the definition
of trafficking, beginning with the use of force, fraud, or coercion for
monetary gain.

Forced rescue in India has thus birthed
a mode of humanitarian trafficking that meets many (if not all) the United
Nations criteria for the definition of trafficking.

No one can doubt that people wishing to escape
traffickers deserve extensive professional assistance to redress the horrors
they experience. But the majority of women that are being targeted for rescue
in Hyderabad in response to the transnational moral panic over trafficking do
not fit that description. Even some anti-traffickers admit this: the head of a
prominent Hyderabadi NGO told a
local news reporter in 2014, ‘We
usually get around sixty-five women sent to our home each month on prostitution
cases. As soon as they arrive in our home, they cry and cry and cry. “When will
you release me? When will you release me?” they ask. They fight and swear. That’s
what we see on a daily basis’.

The 2016 TIP Report portrays forced
rescue as an atypical occurrence in India, but of the 15 formerly ‘rescued’ Hyderabadi sex workers
that I encountered in the course of my broader fieldwork in 2013 and 2016, only
one reported consenting to be rescued, and only two reported positive shelter experiences.
Notably, all of these women chose to return to sex work despite sometimes
undergoing vocational job training programs. These women began selling sex
again, because they found that they were not able to support themselves and
their dependents through the low paid work that NGO trainings prepared them to
accept.

Confining
adult women against their will in the name of rescuing them from trafficking and
then premising their release on their ‘parents, guardians, or husbands’ appearing
to take them home speaks to the stark discrimination that Indian law continues
to mete out to female citizens who should be treated as men’s equals. By
contrast, male and transgender sex workers find themselves harassed or jailed by
police but not forcibly rescued, detained as victims, and subjected to weeks or months of waiting, before being reclaimed by their relatives. Yet some anti-traffickers
continue to insist on the ‘victim’/‘criminal’ binary to describe those who
participate in transactional sex, which raises the question: why are women who
sell sex automatically ‘victims,’ while men and transgender women who sell sex are
not?

The Constitution of India promises liberty and equality
to all its citizens, irrespective of gender. The renowned Indian jurist Ambedkar once asked, ‘What are we having this liberty for? We are having
this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality,
discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights’. Forced
rescues in India conflict with women’s fundamental right to liberty and deny
their basic rights to equal treatment and self-determination. Anti-traffickers
should gain women’s full consent before attempting to rescue or rehabilitate
them. As India reconsiders its approach to addressing human trafficking, women’s
constitutional rights to liberty and equality must prevail over misogynistic
laws that serve to infantilise and harm them.

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